Piero Barrachi was
a pioneering Australian Communist, who threw himself into the struggle for a
revolutionary party in Australia after the Russian revolution. Initially he did
not understand the Stalinist degeneration but eventually he saw through it and
joined the Trotskyists. Simon Williams reviews a book about his life.

This is a book which deserves a wide
audience. Jeff Sparrow has chosen to write a short history of Marxism in
Australia, in the form of a biography of one of its more colourful characters,
Guido Barrachi: bohemian, womanizer and lifelong communist militant. Born in 1887 into a solidly bourgeois
background, the son of famous astronomer Piero Barrachi, Guido attended the
elite Melbourne Grammar School, before moving onto the equally elite Melbourne
University. Unlike many young men from a similar background, who flirt with
radical politics in their youth only to settle into a surly conservatism in
their middle years, Barrachi's politics moved in an increasingly radical
direction. Initially attracted by the utopian socialism of H.G. Wells, he was
introduced to the syndicalist politics of the Industrial Workers of the World
by his lover, the poet Lesbia Harford.

One of the most interesting and problematic
aspects of Barrachi's life is his relationship with various women. Barrachi can
rightly be criticised for the cavalier way in which he treated many of these
women, often under the guise of a commitment to ‘free love', and his failure to
accept his parental responsibilities for the various children he fathered sits
badly with his overt commitment to female emancipation. Nevertheless, it is
clear that several of these women were significant political influences upon
his development. Despite a terminal heart disease, Harford had abandoned a
conventional bourgeois lifestyle to work in a garment factory. From Harford,
Barrachi gains a political insight that will remain with him throughout his
political life: it is not through worthies such as H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and
the Webbs, for whom the working class and its struggles are an embarrassing
distraction, but through ordinary people that socialism will be achieved.

Sent by his mentors to the Fabian inspired
London School of Economics in the hope that this would soften his radical
leanings, Barrachi moves in the opposite direction. Unlike most of the European
left, who were embracing national chauvinism, Barrachi correctly recognises the
coming war for the imperialist bloodbath that it was to be. At the outset of
the war, Lenin remarked that one could fill a bus with the true
internationalists in Europe. Barrachi
would have proudly taken a seat on that bus. Returning to Australia he immerses
himself in the anti-conscription campaign, crossing swords with the future
Eminence Grise of Australian reaction, Robert Menzies. In an ominous foretaste
of things to come he is roughed up by right-wing hooligans and is only saved by
his immense personal charm.

The defining moment of the book and of his
life is the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. Like many on the left, Barrachi
was unsure what to make of the revolution but saw it as an enormously important
social experiment. The Communist Party of Australia, formed in response to the
Revolution was, like its British counterpart, an uneasy hodge-podge of
ultra-leftists and syndicalists. While it quickly drew under its banner the
best elements of the workers movement it embodied from the outset a series of
contradictions.

The defining question for any Marxist
organisation is that of the mass organisations of the working class, in the
Australian context the trade unions and the ALP (Australian Labour Party).
Despite the illusions of some on the left, who lurch from ultra-left
adventurism to opportunism as quickly as other people change shirts on an
Australian summer day, there has never been a golden era in which the ALP was a
radical socialist movement. It has always been a reformist, pro-capitalist
party. Nevertheless, overt policy positions are never the decisive question for
Marxists. The ALP was and remains the political expression of the Trade Union
movement. It is the party to which the working class will return again and
again in the process of drawing revolutionary conclusions. The history of
Marxism in Australia has seen numerous examples of organisations setting
themselves up as the true socialist alternative to Labor. Time and again they
stood on the sidelines, the pure red banners flapping in the wind as the
working class marched past them in the opposite direction. The Socialist
Alliance's current death throes are only the latest instalment in this sorry
history.

The problem facing the Communist Party of
Australia from the outset was to how to reach the broad masses of the working
class. While this is a problem for any Marxist organisation, Australia presents
particular difficulties. On the one
hand, there are the formidable geographical issues: a sparse population
distributed in a few urban centres, in which most of the infrastructure is
concentrated. On the other, there is the distinctive political situation.

The European history of Australia begins
with penal settlement. With the discovery of its vast mineral resources in the
late nineteenth-century the British ruling class came to realise that Australia
could be exploited as more than simply a dumping ground for undesirables. In
exporting convicts, the British exported the best and worst of the British
working class. Among the first transportees were the Trades Unionists, such as
the Tolpuddle martyrs and they were later joined by Irish rebels.

Penal settlement brought with it radical
politics. At the same time it brought the sweepings from the gutters of London
and other major cities, carrying in their wake the poison of racism and
religious sectarianism. Given Australia's geographical position, it cannot
afford to detach itself from the struggles on the Asian mainland. Yet, from its
earliest days the Australian labour movement campaigned vigorously against
Chinese immigration and the ALP was the main supporter of the White Australia
policy until well into the 1970s. Add to
these contradictions the peculiar position of the Australian ruling class "the
Bunyip Aristocracy", bringing with them that distinctive combination of
hypocrisy and cynicism so familiar from the British bourgeoisie and away from
the watchful eye of their ‘betters' in London, the Australian capitalists have
never hesitated to use the most ruthless measures against dissent: censorship,
police harassment and often outright brutality. All this ensures that the class
struggle very quickly becomes polarised here.

The Communist Party from its inception was
riven by the kind of internecine disputes which caused an exasperated Lenin to
write Left-Wing Communism. Sectarians
have never understood that the conservative position of the labour bureaucracy
in Australia as elsewhere is based upon material factors rather than simply the
cynicism of the Trade Union leadership. Chronic labour shortages in certain key
industries meant that the Australian labour movement could wrest concessions
from the bosses which were the envy of the working class elsewhere. This has given the workers a degree of
confidence at the same time it has fostered a ‘guild' mentality among skilled
workers. Factional disputes between unions have sometimes been as ferocious as
those between worker and boss and the unions have often acted to exclude women
and ethnic minorities from the workforce.

During the revolutionary upswing which
followed the Russian Revolution the correct policy to adopt would have been a
fraternal orientation toward rank and file trade union and ALP members combined
with a ruthless, principled critique of the bureaucracy. Instead the Communists
either opted for a purist disdain for the ALP and its electioneering or else
immersed themselves in trade union work without attempting to broaden struggles
in a political direction. One ironic moment in Sparrow's book illustrates the
difficult position Communists found themselves in when the comrades are torn
between sympathy for a transport strike and frustration that the lack of
transportation prevent their attending weekly branch meetings.

Growing disheartened by the factional
struggles in the CPA, Barrachi applied for permission to travel to Germany and
arrives at the heart of a pre-revolutionary situation. Despite the defeat of
the Spartakusbund, by 1923 the KPD had emerged as a mass force with deep roots
in the working class. Barrachi launched himself into the work of the
party. Unlike the squabbling Australian
party the KPD gave every appearance of being a party on the move. Unbeknown to
Barrachi the decline of the Comintern as a revolutionary force had already
begun and the process of turning national Communist parties from the militant
vanguard of the working class into, in Trotsky's famous words, "border guards
of the Soviet Union", was already way. The dithering and indecisive role of
Zinoviev and the Comintern leadership led to the defeat of the German
Revolution and ultimately paved the way for the rise of Hitler and the
Stalinist degeneration of the Communist movement.

Barrachi returns to Australia having
learned much from his experiences in Germany and proceeds to throw himself into
party work with renewed vigour. Unfortunately the Stalinist virus had already
begun to penetrate the Australian Communist movement with several contenders
for Stalin's role vying for power. Barrachi becomes disheartened with this and
resigns his memberships of the party, an act that will cost him dearly in later
years. He throws himself into a bohemian lifestyle of drinking and womanising.

Even on the outside of the Party Barrachi
still retains hope in the Soviet Union and becomes active in a Party Front
Organisation "The Friends of the Soviet Union". Party members recognise his
enormous prestige within the movement and encourage his activities. It is under
this guise that he applies and is accepted to travel to the Soviet Union. Upon
arrival in the Soviet Union he is caught up by the enthusiasm generated by the
Stalinist Five Year Plans. Despite the tremendous cost wrought by the mass
industrialisation, which led to death by starvation of hundreds of thousands of
peasants, the Plan demonstrated, albeit in a distorted fashion, the enormous
potential of the planned economy. It is a deep historical irony that Stalin's
plan was a caricature of that put forward by Trotsky for which he was castigated
in the factional struggle. Barrachi and his comrades recognise the tremendous
enthusiasm that the planned economy aroused in the advanced working class in
the cities. At the same time, hints emerge, mostly through Barrachi's less
naïve fellow voyagers, about the desolation in the villages and the monstrous
privileges of the growing bureaucratic caste.

Fortunately his independent means enabled
him to travel to and from the Soviet Union. Had he been there under the direct
sponsorship of the Australian party he would more than likely have fallen
victim to Stalin's purges during which many of his Australian and British
comrades in the Soviet Union disappeared. Returning to Australia inspired by
his time in the Soviet Union, Barrachi once again throws himself into party
work.

Perhaps the most interesting sections of
the book are those which detail Barrachi's growing disillusionment with
Stalinism. Barrachi initially sees the disputes within the Australian party as
a simple factional struggle and while he sides initially with the Stalinists he
urges a fraternal debate. He is even prepared to stomach the beginnings of the
show trials, using an ingenious understanding of dialectical method to show
that Radek and Zinoviev could turn from revolutionaries into reactionaries! His
personal experience was showing him that many of his former comrades had
proceeded from Communism to the Labor right and even to fascism.

Bourgeois commentators of the ‘God that
Failed' variety would see his initial unwillingness to acknowledge Stalin's
crimes as proof of his ideological blinkeredness. In reality, they reflect an
important observation of the mentality of some of the best elements of the
labour movement at that time. The Five Year Plan had won tremendous respect for
the Soviet Union in the minds of the advanced workers. The Communist Party was
everywhere seen as the vanguard of the working class struggle. Only a tiny
handful of Marxists in the Trotskyist movement (and not even all of them)
grasped the full scale of Stalinist degeneration.

However, as Barrachi sees good comrades
hounded out of the party and brutally treated the scales begin to fall from his
eyes. Even then he hesitates. One of the most poignant passages in the book is
where Sparrow has Barrachi asking himself the following question: "If he ceased
believing in Stalin did he have to become something he despised, standing
beside people who opposed not only the Show Trials but also every wage rise
Australian workers had ever asked for?" (Sparrow 2007, p. 238).

This question epitomises the dilemma facing
every honest communist militant. Only the Trotskyists with their pitiful small
forces were able to steer a coherent path between Stalinism and capitalism.
Barrachi finally makes the break and joins the small Trotskyist organization,
the Communist League. In the preparations for war only the Trotskyists offered
a principled position against militarisation, as the Communist Party lurched
between ultra-left lunacy and reformism. As Liberal Leader Menzies prepared once
again to sacrifice the flower of the Australian working class on the
battlefields of Europe and Asia with the racist slogan "You've always despised
them [Asians] now it's time to fight them." Barrachi returns to his
anti-conscription days and calls once again for class war against exploiters in
all countries and for the nationalisation of the economy under workers' control
in order to fight Fascism.

The weakest part of the book recounts the
post-war years. Struggling against a revitalised Communist Party, living off
the prestige of the victory over Hitler, the long post-war upswing and the
growth of McCarthyism in Australia, the tiny band of Trotskyists struggle to
maintain their forces. Barrachi is shown fighting the Vietnam War and he dies
as he lived struggling to defend the Whitlam Government against the
CIA-sponsored Constitutional coup led by Jim Kerr and Malcolm Frazer.

By any standards, Barrachi led an
interesting life. But the book is so much more than a gossipy biography. One of
the fundamental questions it raises is the role of the individual in the
revolutionary process. Marxists are not vulgar materialists and recognise that
at crucial phases the individual can play a key role, for better or worse. When
the movement is going forward, individual foibles matter little. The personal
indecisiveness of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin made no difference to the
outcome of the October Revolution in the context of the favourable balance of
forces and Lenin and Trotsky's resolute leadership. But during a period of
reaction, they played a much bigger - negative ‑ role. Hegel refers to the
‘Cunning of Reason' in which even apparently negative personal traits can be
positive objectively speaking. For instance, only the stubborn determination of
a comrade like Ted Grant could have kept the flame of genuine Marxism alive
during the dark years of the post-war period. The same applies to Barrachi. In
the revolutionary upswing his undoubted literary talents and sheer personal
charisma meant that he was a pole of attraction to the best elements in the
Australian workers' movement. In a period of reaction these could be distorted
and used against him just as Trotsky's brilliance was twisted and used against
him by the Stalinist dullards.

Much of this is beyond an individual's
control. However, there is a salutary lesson to be learned for all Marxists
from Barrachi's life. The bohemian lifestyle he fostered, his mistreatment of
the women in his life and the scandalous way in which he treated his children
would do little to endear him to ordinary working men and women struggling to
bring up their children and give them a decent life. There is a world of
difference between struggling for an equitable society, in which men and women
live and love as equals and the bourgeois illusion of ‘free love', which as
feminists in the sixties pointed out, more often than not was anything but free
for the women involved. We are all familiar with those petty-bourgeois
sectarians who turn up at meeting wearing scruffy clothes, smoking pot and
swearing in an effort to endear themselves to ‘the workers'. In reality, as
anyone from a working-class background knows, no self-respecting worker would
dress or behave like that. All such dilettantes do is reinforce the worst
prejudices of bourgeois society. In building a bridge to the workers we must be
attentive of the small details as much as the major principles.

Let us not dwell on the negatives, however.
For all his failings, Guido Barrachi was a dedicated fighter for socialism in
the Australian labour movement and internationally. Those of us who come
afterwards owe an immense debt of gratitude to these pioneers. It is worth
recalling the gallows speech of Irish Revolutionary, Robert Emmett: "Let no man
write my epitaph". He was referring to the struggle for Irish independence but
we can raise a similar sentiment for the pioneers of Marxism here and abroad.
Only when the working class has risen to power and destroyed oppression and
exploitation will there be a fit time to write the epitaph of people like Guido
Barrachi. Until such time we have Sparrow's book.